Your health: Hot weather causes rising tempers

Hot temperatures cause rising tempers

If you're driving down the expressway on a hot day and feel like other motorists seem a little more aggressive or dangerous, you may not be imagining things, the Examiner reports.

“You're out in the heat, and that heat produces a stress load on your body, as your body tries to compensate and keep itself at a homeostatic temperature,” Dr. William Robison, a clinical psychologist, told KSPR.

That stress builds up and makes you more irritable.

“When our irritability rises, our temper goes with it,” he said.

If you're out in the heat and you feel yourself getting angry, take a step back to gather your thoughts, Robison suggests.

“Try to deal with things in the here and now. Ask yourself that question, 'What can I do about this problem that's facing me right now?' If there's something you can do, go and do it. On the other hand, if there's nothing you can do about the problem, try to set it aside and let it be. And move onto something that you can do something about,” said Robison.

If the heat is your problem, Robison says try to find a cool place to chill out. If you don't have air conditioning at home, he suggests going to the library or even the movie theater.

A final tip is to drink plenty of water when you're out in the heat. Robison says when you get dehydrated, you can lose the ability to think straight, and to reason with people.

What would make you happier: More time or more money?

Americans who want more time in their lives are happier than those who want more money, according to new research published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Across a range of surveys and experiments involving more than 4,400 people, researchers at UCLA and the Wharton School found that nearly two-thirds of respondents said they'd prefer having more money over more time.

But the people who opted for more time were happier with their lives, The Washington Post reports. Not only that, but the respondents who indicated the strongest preferences for more time were also the most happy — in other words, “the more people preferred time over money, the happier they were.”

There's an interesting wrinkle in all of this, though: People who want more time are different in many ways from people who want more money. The time-choosers were, on average, older. They were more likely to have kids, and to be married. They had less discretionary time because they worked more, and they also had a higher average income as a result.

All of which raises an interesting question: People who want more time are happier. But couldn't this simply be because these people already have enough money? In other words, could happiness be less a function of wanting time, and more a function of having money?

Even when researchers did control for the amount of money people already have, they saw the same effect. So, in other words, take a bunch of people making, say, $75,000 a year, and ask them whether they want more time or more money in their lives. Those who say they want more time will be happier, on average, than the ones who want more money.